08 February 2015 12:13 AM

There are three months to go before the Election and we are already chest-deep in ludicrous partisan drivel. Funny that the more alike the parties are, the more slime they chuck over each other.

But education is a special case even in this miserable apology for a national debate. For instance, the Prime Minister is now promising an all-out ‘war on mediocrity’, which will be waged by nationalising as many schools as possible.

I suppose that means that all our children will be above average, yet another example of Mr Cameron’s strange arithmetic.

We already know he can’t tell the national debt from the deficit. He revealed in a TV documentary last week that he thinks three halves make a whole. His increase in school spending turned out to be a cut.

And, along with his Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, he didn’t dare answer a question on times tables.

Political maths, I suspect, work on a completely different principle, and have more to do with how much money you can squeeze out of a hedge-fund billionaire in a tax shelter.

Yet Ms Morgan had begun the political week by promising a new emphasis on the ‘three Rs’, and saying that all children leaving primary school should know their times tables.

Why, it was the forgotten Tory Education Secretary John Patten, in September 1992. In November 1994, another one, Gillian Shephard, launched a ‘school blueprint aimed at putting the “three Rs” at the centre of lessons’.

In January 1996, Shadow Education Secretary David Blunkett urged teachers to concentrate on the ‘three Rs’. A few days later Anthony Blair, then Opposition Leader, condemned the ‘appalling’ levels of literacy and numeracy among schoolchildren. By January 1998, these two were in office, and Mr Blunkett was demanding, yes, a return to chanting times tables.

Apparently nobody was paying attention, because a year later it was revealed that ‘schoolkids will be going back to learning their times tables tomorrow as David Blunkett scraps 30 years of trendy maths teaching’.

In September 2004, they still weren’t listening, as an academic study demanded that ‘schoolchildren should be made to chant their multiplication tables in class’.

By August 2006, the Labour Education Secretary was Alan Johnson, who proclaimed that children would be fast-tracked through their times tables in a string of reforms to the way the ‘three Rs’ were taught in primary schools.

But by December 2010 it was reported that ‘one in four 11-year-olds leaves primary school without a proper grasp of the three Rs, according to detailed Government data released yesterday’.

And lo, in June 2012, Ms Morgan’s forerunner, Michael Gove, was reported to be planning to ‘tear up the rules’ about what must be taught in primary school. Among his plans, yes... times tables were to be put back at the heart of the curriculum for children’s first years at school ‘for the first time in decades’.

There’ll be another Education Secretary along soon. Just wait for him or her to make the same pledge. And then laugh.

The only times table that actually applies to these people is the nought times table. A thousand times nought still makes nought. The only multiplication our children are reliably taught and encouraged to do is sexual reproduction.

And as long as our political leaders jointly refuse to restore order, authority and selection in the state schools, the result will be the same.

Don't fall for the sex education myth

People still mistakenly think that there is an important difference between the Tory and Labour parties over sex propaganda in schools.

On the contrary, both parties are entirely wedded to the radical sex-liberation policies of the 1960s, now the iron-bound law of the land, which it is dangerous to question, let alone disobey.

Mr Cameron, when he was still Leader of the Opposition in April 2010, had this exchange with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight:

Paxman: ‘You’re in favour of faith schools being able to teach sex education as they like?’

Cameron: ‘Not as they like. That’s not right. What we voted for was what the Government suggested in the end, which is proper sex education...’

Paxman: ‘Should they be free to teach that homosexuality is wrong, abortion is wrong, contraception is wrong?’

‘No, and the [Labour] Government discussed this and came up with a good idea, which is to say that we wanted a clearer path of sexual education across all schools, but faith schools were not given any exemption, but they were able to reflect some of their own faith in the way that this was taught.

‘But no, you must teach proper lessons in terms of gay equality and also combat homophobic bullying in schools, I think that’s extremely important.’

I’d be interested to see evidence that such teaching does actually reduce bullying.

But in any case, it’s quite clear that the ‘Conservative’ Party has no serious differences with Labour on this.

If you don’t like Tristram Hunt’s latest plans for talking about sex to tots, don’t expect any help from the Tories.

I wonder what God makes of Mr Fry

My old adversary Stephen Fry (he calls me a ‘slug’) has been attacking God on TV, calling the Ancient of Days ‘capricious, mean-minded’, 'selfish’ and ‘a maniac’.

Obviously Mr Fry, left, gets to meet God quite a lot, being so important and all, but it would be good if someone could get the Almighty to let us know what He thinks of Mr Fry.

Falling into the Islamic State trap

I absolutely decline to watch horror videos showing fanatics murdering their prisoners. I am sure it is morally wrong to do so.

I am still haunted by my decision, when I was younger, to witness two lawful executions of heinous convicted murderers.

But aside from that, I believe these zealots hope we will watch this obscenity and as a result lose our reason and launch unwise and stupid attacks on them, which will end in our moral and physical defeat. Some people are already falling into this trap.

Arming Kiev

I have never doubted for a moment that Russia is aiding the rebels in Ukraine with men and munitions, though this is difficult to prove.

What puzzles me is that so many do not seem to suspect that the USA and other Nato countries are likewise helping Ukraine’s shambolic army fight the war we urged them to start. How naive can you be? The American threats to arm Kiev’s forces may already have been carried out, but by deniable and indirect routes (as happened in Afghanistan).

I continue to be amazed at the enthusiasm in this country for getting involved in the third major European war in a century. What do we hope to gain?

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15 January 2015 1:56 PM

Let’s hope David Cameron sticks to his daft insistence that he won’t take part in a TV election debate unless the Greens are there too. I’m always amused by the claims of toadying commentators that Mr Cameron has a sure touch, a brilliant mind, etc. etc. There is no evidence that this is so, and never has been. He has played a bad hand badly, and if it were not for his only real skill –public relations – and the willingness of so many in the media to be gulled by him, he would long ago have been pushed to the side of the road and left there to rust.

He is almost singlehandedly responsible for the transformation of UKIP from marginal Dad’s Army to semi-mainstream Dad’s Army. He is close to a genius at picking fights with his own constituency which do not (as planned ) gain him support among BBC types and Guardian readers, but which do severely alienate former Tory voters and members. He seems mesmerised by a desire to gain and keep the support of the Murdoch Press, which will (as it always has done) toady to him while he is in office, and drop him as soon as it is sure he is a loser.

Now he has misjudged the TV debates issue. Even I, a person who is interested in politics and needs to know what is going on, strive to stop my mind wandering (nay, not just wandering but happily packing a picnic and setting off on a long hike, perhaps stopping for a while at a picturesque pub or tearoom) during these events.

They are by their nature very boring, as there really isn’t very much left to say on any of the subjects that come up. Worse, there isn’t a major politician in England who can put on a compelling personal performance that you would want to watch for its own sake.

This isn’t true of Alex Salmond, who is at least interesting to watch, or of George Galloway, perhaps the last proper political orator at large in Britain. But both are Scottish, and neither is in the mainstream of English politics. Some people go on about Al ’Boris’ Johnson, but can I be the only one who finds the performance (for such it is) wears a little thin after the first four or five times? Whenever he does admit to having thought about something, the results are generally banal and conventional.

Properly handled, and with close attention paid to the maxim ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit News’, these events will have no effect at all on the outcome of the election. Messrs Cameron, Miliband and Clegg all have teams of helpers who can realistically rehearse the likely clashes, and give them a pretty good idea of the traps that they might tumble into. It is out of these rehearsals that those ‘spontaneous’ , snappy one-liners emerge.

Mr Cameron may have a bit to fear from Nigel Farage, but not all that much. Mr Farage has already gained all he is going to gain this side of 2015, and perhaps as much as he ever will, depending on what happens next. Because he is his party’s only asset and because he has no long-term tribal vote on which to fall back, he has the most to lose from a bungled encounter. He could actually lose the war for UKIP in an evening .

Like a theoretically powerful fleet-in-being whose implied menace keeps its foes at bay, he is probably better off staying in port and keeping his reputation for power intact, rather than risking all on the High Seas, when one lucky shot could send him gurgling to the bottom.

Besides which, having had one lot of leader’s debates (even if they didn’t actually enjoy them much, or learn much from them) the British viewing public now regard them as a sort of Human Right. To deny them this benefit is to look crabby and shifty and dishonest.

But how does Mr Cameron get himself out of his fix, unless he climbs down and makes his previous stance look silly? It is difficult, but not impossible. He’s climbed down lots of times before. But this time it will depend to some extent on how willing the others are to help him. Mr Farage, who I suspect thinks he will do very well , even though he probably won’t, is likely to be the keenest on a deal. Mr Clegg, who knows nothing can save him anyway, less so; Mr Miliband, who just isn’t telegenic, is probably offering humanist prayers to the forces of history (or whoever humanists pray to, when they want a parking space or a promotion) that Mr Cameron carries on refusing, and the TV companies decide not to go ahead, with an empty podium where the premier ought to be.

If they do decide on the empty podium, may I suggest a large vat of hair-gel, where Mr Cameron would otherwise be standing, or a demijohn of snake-oil, if they can get hold of it at short notice?

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23 November 2014 7:18 AM

I wondered how our neutered, bootlicking, pro-government media would manage to turn David Cameron’s devastating personal and political defeat in Rochester into a disaster for Red Ed.

Piles of money, tankers laden with snake-oil, five visits by the Prime Minister himself, even a frantic plea for Guardian readers’ votes, could not save the Tories from what I reckon was the worst defeat in their entire history, losing a seat to a party which really believes in what the Tories pretend to believe in.

Yet you’d think the main event was the sacking of a Labour nobody by another nobody for doing nothing.

Here’s the supposedly big story: Emily Thornberry MP posted a Tweet in which she wrote the words “Image from Rochester” next to a picture of a house draped with football flags. Gosh.

Somehow this non-event has led to her sacking. Admittedly she has been sacked from a non-job. And if I were Ed Miliband I would have relished the chance to get rid of this blowhard and poser.

She once tried to attack me on ‘Question Time’, shrieking ‘How dare you!’ at me for making a few mild remarks about the need for welfare reform. She sought (quite wrongly) to imply that by doing so I had attacked single mothers personally.

I suppose it’s fitting that someone who uses phoney outrage against others should herself be destroyed by phoney outrage. Ms Thornberry is a typical modern politician, struggling to fool her party’s remaining loyal voters into believing she is anything other than a careerist professional.

Like the former Tory MP and Cameron-boosting media figure Matthew Parris, who sneered at length about Clacton, Ms Thornberry was baffled and amazed when she actually visited modern England.

Presumably, in her smooth daily journey from her rarefied London district to her office, she has never before seen St George’s Cross flags draped on a house. The remarkable thing is that she thought such a sight was unusual and interesting enough to Tweet.

But the incident is essentially trivial. Compared to the earthquake of the Rochester result, it is as weighty and significant as a seagull-dropping falling on to a politician’s greasy head.

What does Rochester mean? It means that a barrier to real and significant change is crumbling and may yet collapse. Seven years ago the brilliant pollster and Blairite establishment figure Peter Kellner (a longstanding Labour Party member) told me at a public debate:

‘I think it's really important that the Conservative Party does survive as a substantial brand, because there will always be a need for a centre-right party.’

Need? I wondered as he spoke, who exactly needs it? Why does a lifelong Lefty like Mr Kellner wish to save the Tories? Mr Kellner read my mind and continued ‘If the Conservatives were to go the way that Peter expects (and I think possibly would relish) I am frightened as to what kind of right-of-centre politics would then spring up...

‘One of the great virtues of British politics...is that we have not had a substantial far-right nationalist xenophobic party in Britain. A substantial Conservative Party is our best bulwark against the kind of politics that I think could become very nasty.’

When Mr Kellner uses terms such as ‘far-right nationalist xenophobic’ he means a party that would be hostile to the European Union’s control of our government, laws and borders. The British left have for many years seen Brussels as the way to turn Britain into the sort of country they want, by the back door.

If you doubt the strength of this link, please note that Mr Kellner is married to Baroness Ashton of Upholland, who has just retired from the European Commission, where she was its (greatly underestimated and unfairly mocked) foreign policy chief.

The Tory party has helped the Left for decades. It has blocked the creation of a strong pro-British parliamentary force.

It has done so by pretending to love Britain when it doesn’t. Its every pose is a fake. All its principal figures are fakes as well. And they have got away with it.

For nearly eight years I have been in something close to despair at the continued willingness of patriotic British men and women to give their votes to the Conservative Party.

This weekend, for the first time, I begin to have a very faint hope that they have finally seen through the Tory Fraud. Rochester has shown that a pro-British rebellion against the Tories could, if properly handled, sweep the country, elbowing Labour aside as it does so.

What I hope for is what the establishment fear. That is why they hope you will be distracted by the drivelling fate of a New Labour nonentity. Do not be.

**************

A Vital Message Hidden in a Laughable Movie

Crowds are flocking to see the laughable new film about the computer genius Alan Turing ‘The Imitation Game’. I think they are mainly women besotted with Benedict Cumberbatch, though some men may enjoy the sight of Keira Knightley got up as a 1940s intellectual sexpot.

It’s the usual hopeless attempt to recreate the past by dressing the cast in acres of tweed, making them all smoke and renting some ancient cars.

But the ending is genuinely horrible. The homosexual Turing is shown robbed of his mental powers by hormone drugs supposedly intended to make him ‘normal’.

We can all shudder at this stupid and wrong treatment. But it is easy to condemn the follies of the past. At the time, fashionable opinion believed Turing’s ‘chemical castration’ was a humane alternative to prison.

What similarly stupid things do we believe today? How about this? Despite growing medical doubts (a report this week said it had more to do with drug marketing than medicine), we dope huge numbers of children with pills very similar to illegal amphetamines.

This mass-doping is justified by the suspect ‘diagnosis’ of an alleged complaint called ‘ADHD’. If Alan Turing were a child now, I think it pretty likely that his ‘odd’ behaviour would lead him to be drugged in this way, killing his special talents.

It seems to me very probable that, as you read this, some potential genius is having his life blighted, forced by smiling adults to swallow pills to make him ‘normal. We can see this was wrong in 1953. Why can’t we see it is wrong now?

*********

I just thought I’d note that it is now officially recognised that the police have been fiddling crime figures, a fact I was jeered at for exposing some time ago. Mind you, the authorities still can’t quite admit that the reason for this is political pressure. Of course it is.

******

How can it possibly be balanced for the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme to run an uncritical, near-reverent commercial for cannabis, as it did on Wednesday? This is not a joke. People who take this drug can end up in locked wards for the rest of their lives. Who was responsible?

19 October 2014 12:00 AM

While we rage and fret about the terrorist outrages of today, how quickly we forget the horrors of the recent past.

I can’t see why. The grief, loss and pain don’t diminish as the years go by. For those who survive, they deepen.

And I admire Lord Tebbit for his unfashionable refusal to forgive the IRA murderers who tried to kill him and his wife, and who did them terrible harm (as well as slaying or maiming several others) in Brighton 30 years ago.

One of the grisly monsters responsible for this, Patrick Magee, now walks about in freedom, thanks to our surrender to the IRA, a national shame we bury in denial and pretend never happened, sometimes even kidding ourselves that we were the winners.

Well, if we won, how is it that Magee is free and apparently living a happy and contented life, while his victims lie in their graves or suffer daily pain and disability?

He was supposed to serve a minimum of 35 years and actually served 14. He still, disgustingly, claims that he had 'no choice' but to use the weapon of murder.

He has had the nerve to try to get his victims to 'understand a bit better what motivated me'.

Some of those victims have, in my view quite mistakenly, forgiven him. Lord Tebbit says with simple dignity: 'I am often asked if I can find it in my heart to forgive the creature, Patrick Magee, who planted the bomb.

'That is not possible, for Magee has never repented.'

Quite. I do not think the Christian religion instructs us to forgive the unrepentant. Nobody in any age but this could possibly imagine that we are supposed to forgive those who don’t seek our forgiveness.

Forgiveness without repentance is like a door without a doorway, or a key without a lock. The one implies and demands the other.

This is something that also needs to be understood by the Blairite bag-carrier Jonathan Powell, who took an active part in the surrender talks with the IRA, and who has just written a book saying we will always have to talk to terrorists in the end.

Actually, this isn’t true. We always have done so, but that is not because we had no choice.

We did it because we are weak and have lost our will to survive as a civilisation and a culture. If they knew we would never talk, and that we would crush them utterly, we would have many fewer of them.

As it is, terrorists decide the destiny of much of the world. The more militantly our leaders condemn them now, the more you can be sure that they will be inviting them to a white-tie dinner at Windsor in a year or two.

Mrs Clooney is right: we have to lose our Marbles

I back Amal Clooney in her battle to get the Elgin Marbles sent back to their home in Athens.

We rescued them from the Ottomans. We’ve guarded them well. But now their home is safe again, and we have had them for long enough.

They are one of the glories of human civilisation, and that is exactly why it would be right and generous for us to let them go back to the place they were made in and for.

It is the civilised thing to do, without bargains or conditions.

I never really understood this until, in an American museum, I saw a sculpture that had once stood in Lincoln Cathedral.

I was enraged. Why was it not still there, where it belonged? But it was nothing like as important as the Marbles.

There can be no rule or precedent about this. There is only one Parthenon and only one Acropolis.

That is why an act of selfless generosity is the best way of ending the quarrel.

Dave can’t stop deceiving – even after he’s caught

How funny the ‘Conservative’ Party has become.

Not only are its would-be candidates for the Rochester by-election sternly asked in public if they, too, plan to defect.

One end of it doesn't know what the other end is doing. Last week the Mayor of London, Al (‘Boris’) Johnson, said the 2010 Tory promise to limit immigration was a ‘big deception’. This is quite true.

David Cameron must have known perfectly well that he had no power to fulfil this pledge as long as Britain stayed in the EU.

After this Ratner moment, in which a very senior party member openly admitted his party had lied to win votes, you might expect a pause before they did it again. But no, Mr Cameron started raging about an ‘emergency brake’ on immigration.

No details were given, because there weren’t any. Again, no such brake can be applied without leaving the EU. So Mr Cameron contrived to sound as if he was on the verge of favouring a British exit, when in real life he’s almost as Europhile as Jean-Claude Juncker.

Is it just me, or are people at last beginning to see through this amazingly transparent man, who resorts instinctively to dishonesty, as a weed in a dingy backyard climbs towards the light?

Let us hope that his attempt to drown the truth in money, in the Rochester by-election, fails.

Voters might ask themselves why the oligarchs and sharks who wrote cheques to the Tories at their semi-secret ‘Black and White Ball’ should be so keen to see Ukip beaten.

I don't think the Labour Party actually wants to win next May’s General Election. Given that government is far more enjoyable and better rewarded than opposition, why is this?

Some of Labour’s Blairites do actually prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband. Mr Cameron boasts of being the ‘Heir to Blair’ and follows Blairite policies at home and abroad.

And the supposedly ineffectual Ed Miliband had the nerve to beat his Blairite brother in a fair fight, for which he will never be forgiven.

But I think it’s even deeper than that. Labour’s leadership can see there’s a huge economic crisis coming soon, and don’t want to be in office when it happens.

If they exert themselves, the polls show they could get a narrow majority.

If they don’t exert themselves, the Tories can’t get a majority (this is an arithmetical impossibility) but they might just be the largest party.

They’ll have little or no power, but they will take the blame for the coming crash.It explains a lot, if I’m right.

At this time of year, how I long for the clocks to return to proper Greenwich time.

The mornings are ridiculously dark. So-called ‘daylight saving time’ (which does nothing of the kind) must have been devised by people who get up late, to torment those of us who get up early.

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16 October 2014 12:39 PM

As the world economy shudders and jolts on its tracks, and the markets plunge, it occurs to me that there’s an explanation for the generally feeble nature of Labour’s campaign for the May 2015 election.

The Tories, as we know, cannot hope for a majority next May, whatever happens. If UKIP were abducted by aliens, it would still be the same. All the sordid and unprincipled Tory weapons - pretending to be hostile to the EU while favouring it, dishonest immigration policies they don’t mean and know they can’t implement, referendums they don’t want and won’t have the power to call, post-dated cheques written on empty accounts, unfunded tax cuts, panics about terrorism, claims that they have rescued the economy when they have in fact loaded it down with even heavier chains of debt, personal smears of Labour leaders, drenching marginals with money – can only serve to keep the Tory party on life support. The thing will still appear to be alive, and might just possibly be the largest single party if the complex constituency arithmetic falls that way. But too many of its habitual voters have deserted forever, or passed away (and so deserted for even longer than forever) for it to obtain a majority at Westminster.

Labour, by contrast, can actually win. It’s unlikely, especially now that the SNP is chewing up Labour support in Scotland, but a fierce and vigorous campaign might achieve an absolute majority. The Parliamentary boundaries allow it. Labour’s unchanging lead over the Tories in all serious opinion polls (confirmed recently by ICM after a spate of incredible claims of a Tory lead following Mr Cameron’s laughable tax cut speech in Birmingham) allows it. Despite attempts to pretend that UKIP is as great a threat to Labour as it is to the Tories simply aren’t true. UKIP did *not* beat Labour at last week’s by-election. It did beat the Tories, and by a huge margin. The Tory vote collapsed in both Clacton and in Heywood and Middleton. Labour’s vote collapsed only in Clacton. They held their share in Heywood and Middleton and will do so in the higher poll of the general election. I doubt if UKIP will win the seat in May.

So why aren’t Labour trying? Why isn’t the Labour establishment rallying round to grasp the victory which is within reach? Blairite sulking over the (deserved) failure of the undistinguished and weirdly overpraised David Miliband to beat his brother really has run its course. What is supposed to be so great about David, who somehow became Foreign Secretary without even knowing that Britain had knighted Robert Mugabe? If they’d wanted to get rid of Ed, they should have done so years ago. They haven’t. It’s too late now, unless some wholly unpredictable cataclysm forces him to resign.

All professional politicians normally prefer office to opposition. There’s more fun, more money, more chance of cashing in afterwards.

I think Labour knows something which the Tories (who perhaps believe their own propaganda about the economy) don’t know or can’t believe. They can see that George Osborne’s housing-based bubble cannot last and must burst with a loud bang pretty soon. They can see that higher employment has only been achieved though the creation of huge numbers of ‘self-employed’ jobs which pay so little that the supposed employees earn too little to pay tax. They know that the City is full of foreboding and that the deep faults of uncontrollable, unaccountable debt which caused the last crash have not been put right. Far from it.

I think Labour fears to be the party in power when the coming economic storm, long in gestation, finally breaks. I think whoever is in power when that crisis comes will be out of office for a very long time, if not wholly broken. And that we may well end up with a grand coalition as we try to pick up the pieces afterwards. So why try now?

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10 October 2014 3:55 PM

So what does it all mean? I expect there will be great efforts to portray the election results of Friday as an equal blow to Labour and the Tories. I have already had this impression from the broadcast coverage today, and expect something similar from the printed media tomorrow.

This is not true. The immediate danger is very much to the Tories. The danger to Labour follows from the Zombie effect – that it is only tribal hatred for the Tories that holds Labour together, and that when one cadaver falls, the other will come tumbling after.

Just because Labour says its vote held up quite well in Heywood and Middleton, you don’t have to laugh and disbelieve the statement.

Look at the comparative results, in Heywood and Middleton, for 2010 and 2014:

In 2010 Labour got 18,499 (40.1%)In 2014 they got 11,633 (40.9%)

So their share (of a smaller vote,) was not that bad.

The thing was that they faced an opponent who drew from a far wider base than had previously existed. UKIP could have beaten them. The Tories never could have.

UKIP’s 11,016 (38.7%) is an utter transformation from their turnout of 1,215 (2.6%) in 2010. Even if you add to that the 3,239 (7%)votes scored by the BNP in 2010 (which I think is probably reasonable), what has clearly happened is that both Tory and Lib Dem votes have deserted in large numbers to UKIP.

The Tory vote in the by-election was 3,496 (not much greater than the BNP scored in 2010) . This is a colossal drop from their tally in 2010, of 12,528. Likewise the Liberal Democrat vote fell from 10,474 to 1,457.

The crumbling of the Coalition votes in Heywood and Middleton is far, far more dramatic than the fraying of the Labour vote.

Interestingly, the Labour vote in Clacton suffered much more, falling from 10,799 (25%) to 3,957(11.2%).

This is bad, but nothing like as bad as what happened to the Tories. First, they lost a safe seat. Next, the Tory vote in Clacton fell cataclysmically from 22,867 (53%) to 8,709 (24.6%). The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, shrivelled from 5,577(12.9%) to 483 (1.4%).

One or two unconventional points about these results. If more Tories had voted for UKIP in Heywood and Middleton, they would have taken the seat from Labour. If they are really worried about ‘Red Ed’, northern Tory voters should vote UKIP. The Tories could never have won the seat. UKIP could have done.

If more Tory MPs decide *now*, or in the next few months to switch to UKIP, they can pretty much guarantee a large contingent of UKIP MPs in May 2015, in many cases winning seats which would fall to Labour if they fought as Tories. This would tear to ribbons the (already dubious) view that a UKIP vote favours Labour. It raises the possibility, remote but real, that the Tories – if they really want what they say they want – could get it by allying with a sizeable UKIP contingent in Parliament after 2015.

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15 September 2014 3:00 PM

I am grateful to Gyles Brandreth, that often wise and entertaining person, for immortalizing a moment back in 1997, when , almost alone in British journalism, I was hostile to the Blair creature, and had been identified as an enemy by the Blair machine.

…that I used to sit through Mr Blair’s election press conferences (these, once daily during campaigns, have now been all but abolished because they are so hard to control) with my hand permanently raised. The truth was that I knew the future Warlord of Mespotamia didn’t want to take a question from me, and I wanted to underline this fact in a polite but unmistakable fashion. Keeping my hand high was the best way of doing so. It also benefited reporters from the Reykjavik Argus and the Almaty Gazette, who would get called by Mr Blair if my hand and theirs were up, long after the big beasts of the media had run out of questions.

Mr Brandreth records: ‘Tuesday, May 29

“At the Labour press conference, the journalist sitting next to me, Peter Hitchens, has his hand in the air for half-an-hour without being called.

‘Are you ever called?’ I ask. ‘I’m not waiting to ask a question,’ he explains. ‘This is a position in tantric yoga designed to suppress nausea.’ “

Gyles did actually write this at the time, but the newspaper for which he was then scribbling refused to use my name, as I worked for a rival organ and therefore Could Not Be Mentioned. I think it is strong evidence of the well-known fact that I have absolutely no sense of humour.

I did eventually get called, a few days but he didn’t answer my question, and got tetchy when I tried to persist, ordering me to sit down and stop being bad.

Those were enjoyable times, in a way. New Labour was starting to be slick, but nothing like as slick as it would later become.

Nobody now believes me when I say (truthfully) that Labour apparatchiks tried to slam the doors of Labour’s 1997 manifesto launch press conference in my face, claiming ludicrously ‘It’s full’. But they did. I pushed past.

Nobody now believes me when I recall that a very senior Blair aide promised me an interview with Mr Blair, purely to get me of the doorstep of a building in which he was cowering, rather than risk me asking him an embarrassing question in front of the TV cameras on the way out. Perhaps they recalled a certain incident involving me, Neil Kinnock and an attempted question, during the 1992 election campaign. There had been a sort of melee, as I had tried to ask a question (having been ignored at a press conference), and Mr Kinnock's aides had sought to prevent me. In the end, Mr Kinnock rather nobly intervened to rescue me from his would-be guardians. This had been the start of the profoundly obscure 'Jennifer's Ear' affair, which some Labour supporters still believe helped cost Mr Kinnock the election. I don't, but then who would want to be responsible for saving John Major's bacon, which I would be if 'Jennifer's Ear' had had the impact attributed to it. Gosh, it's now 22 years ago.

Idiotically, I did not negotiate any details of the promised interview. I could see it was a ploy, but thought it was at least a genuine ploy. When I was ushered into the presence, the Blair Creature and Alastair Campbell briefly heckled me, ignored my questions, and then got up to leave as I was checking a reference in the Labour Manifesto. I have a picture of this moment (Mr Blair had a personal photographer on hand), and the smirks on the faces of those two are worth seeing. Well, they got what they wanted so badly, but whether both or either of them are now glad of the way their lives went, others must judge.

What I actually wanted to ask the Blair creature about was his insertion of one his children into a highly selective Roman Catholic state school, of a type wholly unavailable to most people in Britain, while saying in his manifesto ‘What I want for my own children, I want for yours’.

Since Labour’s then policy actually discouraged the establishment and spread of schools such as the one involved, I thought this was a bit of a nerve. It was very similar to the nerve of former Education Secretary Michael Gove, now Britain’s leading Blairite, who spent years going about the wonders of the Church of England Comprehensive a couple of minutes from his home, Burlington Danes at Wormwood Scrubs, and then chose the highly selective Grey Coat Hospital (also C of E), miles from his home, for his own child. By the way, I haven’t been in touch with Mr Gove, nor he with me, since I attacked him for this piece of Blairism.

14 September 2014 12:44 AM

Actually if I were Scottish, I would be voting ‘Yes’ just to spite all the people who are trying to frighten and browbeat me into voting ‘No’. Anyone with any spirit must surely feel this way.

If ever we do get the much-promised vote on EU membership, the anti-British side will use just the same tricks and smears to scare us into staying in this miserable liberal German empire. I only hope that, if so, we will have the backbone to ignore them and vote for our independence.

Listen to it – the poor Scots are threatened with currency collapse, bankruptcy, irrelevance and isolation. There’ll even be a frontier, doubtless with barking dogs, searchlights and minefields planted with exploding haggises.

Well, what do you think we’re all going to get if we stay in the EU? The real scare story is that 40 years of EU membership and wild overspending have brought the whole UK to ruin.

The current strength of sterling is an absurdity and can’t last. George Osborne’s boom is the most irresponsible bubble since the 1970s, based entirely on ludicrously cheap housing credit.

Roughly half the containers that leave our main port at Felixstowe contain nothing but air, and quite a few of the rest are crammed with rubbish for recycling, because our real export trade has collapsed, much of it throttled by EU membership.

The incoming containers are full, of course, of cars, clothes, gadgets and food – but how are we to pay for them?

As usual, the biggest story of the week was buried – the rise in our monthly trade deficit during July to £3.3 billion. That includes the famous ‘services’ which are supposed to make up for the fact that we don’t manufacture much any more.

It is impossible to see how we can live so far beyond our means for much longer. Both Government and people are deeper in debt than ever.

So forgive me if I point out that it’s quite scary enough staying in the UK. The trouble with the ‘Better Together’ lot is that scares are all they’ve got.

None of the three party leaders – supposedly rivals, actually accomplices – truly loves the Union.

They all view it as an outdated, conservative idea and they much prefer the glinting Teutonic rule of Brussels and Berlin.

They’ve been working night and day for decades to destroy British patriotism, culture and history, and replace them with a tasteless, pasteurised multiculturalism.

Who can blame the Scots for wanting to stay Scottish rather than be processed into the same greyish puree?

But David Cameron and Nick Clegg both correctly fear a ‘Yes’ vote will cost them their jobs, which they should by rights have lost after their dire results in the Euro elections in May.

And Ed Miliband fears that a ‘Yes’ vote will destroy his party’s chances of ever winning a Westminster majority. That’s all they’re fighting for – themselves.

Having got used to the idea that Scotland may say goodbye, I’ve been thinking about possible good consequences. Setting aside the puncturing of David Cameron, one of the most over-rated figures ever to become Premier, there’s the strong possibility that, without Scotland, we will actually leave the EU.

I don’t presume to speak for the Welsh, but I am quite confident that England on her own can, if she wishes, be a happy and successful civilisation. In fact it might do us no end of good to rediscover ourselves.

But one thing we must stop doing – in fact it would be a good idea to stop it now. A nation that has trouble keeping itself together has no business bombing other nations or peoples to try to force them to do our will.

A peek at out leaders' secret past

I am pleased that a film – The Riot Club – has been made about spoiled young men who spend their time at Oxford getting drunk and wrecking things.

Three of our most senior Tory figures belonged to such a club, and don’t seem to me to have been either frank or especially apologetic about their behaviour.

On the contrary, very serious (and I would think expensive) attempts have been made by unknown persons to prevent the publication of pictures showing these future grandees in their drinking suits. One such picture has been mysteriously, if clumsily, doctored, presumably to conceal something important.

Given that the Tory Party has made such an effort to attack Ed Miliband for his inability to eat a sandwich, I think we are entitled to dwell on its leaders’ ability to get hog-whimperingly drunk in tailcoats.

Cameron's 'triumph' is Libya's disaster

More news of Mr Cameron’s neglected triumph in Libya. As he prepares to dispatch RAF jets to pound yet another desert, our modern Churchill really should boast more about the outcome of his brilliantly directed overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.

For instance, did you know that the Libyan parliament, keystone of the ‘democracy’ Mr Cameron created in Tripoli with British rockets and bombs, is now meeting in a requisitioned Greek car ferry, moored to a dockside in Tobruk? Tobruk, as some of you will remember from history, is the last stop in Libya before you get to Egypt.

It cannot, alas, meet anywhere else in Libya because the rest of the country is under the control of rampaging Islamist gangsters, and people-smugglers who daily send hundreds more refugees in leaking boats towards Italy and, eventually, Calais. The mood on board the car ferry is said to be ‘sombre’. I should think so.

If the entire Libyan parliament turns up at Tilbury on the good ship Elyros, I suggest that immigration officers direct them to the hills outside Witney, where Mr Cameron has a nice weekend home, paid for by you and me.

There, he and the Libyan MPs can wonder together where they went wrong.

A new study shows that teenagers who smoke cannabis are 60 per cent less likely to finish school or get a degree, compared with those who never touch it.

Daily users of the drug are also seven times more likely to attempt suicide than non-users.

These important facts could explain several worrying trends in our country. Yet the report was barely mentioned by most media – especially those who relentlessly plug irresponsible and wicked campaigns to destroy what’s left of our drug laws.

A survey into the past and present drug use of Left-wing media executives might explain this strange reticence. Time it was done.

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07 August 2014 5:06 PM

What follows is an extended response to a timely and justified criticism from Mr Wylie in the ‘Boris Johnson’ thread.

Mr Wylie asked :

‘Recently Mr Hitchens commented on the courage of one of his readers for his willingness to rethink his stance on addiction. Can I ask Mr Hitchens when he will have the courage to admit that he was wrong on his predicted split of the Coalition Government, by the Spring of 2014, through some sort of manufactured row between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and that Vince Cable would take over from Nick Clegg as leader of the Liberal Democrats, following Nick Clegg’s appointment as a European Commissioner. These were views that Mr Hitchens expressed in his blog on 25th November 2011, 4th March 2012, 15th July 2012, and then on 17th May 2013, bafflingly under the headline ‘MYSTIC HITCHENS IS RIGHT AGAIN’, even though the events he had forecast had not actually happened yet. Come on Mr Hitchens, show your courage and admit that you got this one wrong.

I replied ( as soon as I saw his comment in the queue): ‘Mr Wylie asks :' Can I ask Mr Hitchens when he will have the courage to admit that he was wrong on his predicted split of the Coalition Government, by the Spring of 2014, through some sort of manufactured row between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and that Vince Cable would take over from Nick Clegg as leader of the Liberal Democrats, following Nick Clegg’s appointment as a European Commissioner. ' Mr Wylie is quite right , and he has pricked my conscience. I have been meaning to address this for some time, and will do so (with full admission of error) in a proper post soon. But yes, I was wrong.'

I repeat, my prediction was wrong.

I won’t offer any defence, as such, simply say that in my view the Coalition Parties would have been more sensible if they had done what I predicted. I am sure such an arrangement was considered. Could it be that it didn’t happen because a planned putsch against Nick Clegg failed? The whole affair certainly had the look of a botched coup to me.

What they have done instead is an elaborate distancing act, in which Mr Cameron and his colleagues attempt to give the impression that they have woken from a long liberal sleep and become conservatives ‘initiatives’ about welfare. Immigration, crime, the EU etc) , and the Liberal Democrats are increasingly publicly critical of those areas of coalition policy with which they disagree.

My only puzzle is why Mr Clegg wants to stay in Coalition to the bitter end, and why his MPs are ready to let him do so. Maybe they just decided that nothing could save them.

The Tories, as was plain from the appalling spin they successfully foisted on their media toadies after the Euro-elections, genuinely believe their own propaganda, that they can win outright, that Labour were the main losers in May (statistically this is blatantly untrue) and have pinned almost everything on the so-called (buy them) ‘Kill Mill’ strategy.

This aims to mock and diminish Ed Miliband to such an extent that he becomes as much of a liability as Gordon Brown was (after a similarly disreputable campaign of personal vilification) in the last election. It had not occurred to me when I made my prediction that British politics had now sunk to such a puerile level. I apologize for failing to realise the depths to which the Tory machine would sink, and the willingness of the media circus to go along with this.

Mind you, I should have realised that. After all, if there’s no earthly reason to vote Tory, the only thing you can do is to smear the other side.

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06 August 2014 4:08 PM

So much for the incessant stratagems of Lynton Crosby, the Australian wonder-worker of the polls who sometimes seems to be personally directing the whole government. So much for the allegedly New Iron Lady (alternatively The British Angela Merkel) Mrs Theresa May, flailing wildly to conceal the fact that she can and will do nothing about mass immigration or crime.

So much for the ‘Kill Mill’ plan to destroy Ed Miliband by incessant personal abuse. So much for the supposed vote-winning powers of the new Tory Youth Movement (‘Ambition Above All’ is their watchword, and ‘What do you mean, conservative?’ their question) , fanning out to marginal constituencies by the busload to replace decrepit and/or mutinous actual Tory members in the fight for votes.

Mr Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson (‘Boris’ is his stage name, his family call him ‘Al’) has plainly concluded that the Tories cannot and will not win the general election in May, or even do well in it.

He will of course not say so. But how could he?

This is why he has advertised himself as a candidate in the fast-approaching general election, in an announcement only one step short of actually standing in the middle of London with a sandwich board round his neck saying ‘Safe Seat Wanted’ .

If he thought the Tories would win in May, he would not risk the slight whiff of gamesmanship which must hang around a person who once pledged not to hold two political offices at once, and now says that this is exactly what he now desires and plans to do (his term as President of the People’s Republic of London will not end until 2016).

After all, what would be the hurry to get into Parliament and burden himslf with the school and parking problems of some suburb, if David Cameron was likely to sweep back into Downing Street with the first Tory majority since 1997 (always a raving fantasy) , or even if Mr Cameron was likely to hold on to the premiership thanks to being largest single party in a re-hung Parliament (a possibility which the opinion polls have been unambiguously ruling out now for some years, with iron consistency)?

There wouldn’t be any hurry. He could keep his promise and stay as Mayor. Mr Johnson can get into Parliament pretty much when he wants to, given a few months’ notice.

The remaining Tories all swoon and grovel at the approach of 'Boris', laughing helplessly if he says so much as ‘Good Evening’, reduced to pitiful hysterics if he actually attempts a joke, their hero, their only star, the Great, the Stupendous, the Officially Funny….Boris!

No sitting member is safe from his approach. If 'Boris' wants a seat, then he can pretty much have it from these fans. And this will remain so until the day when Mr Johnson is actually tested in office, if he ever is, and turns out to be just like David Cameron, only more so.

The same thing happened to Mr Cameron, too, of course. the poor old loyalists thought he was a secret Superconservative, dressed up as a sort of Clark Kent. He turned out not even to be Clark Kent, but to be David Cameron.

But there wouldn’t be any hurry for Mr Johnson to become an MP in a Tory party restored to office. On the contrary. Mr Johnson, we may safely say, does not yearn to be a backbencher, or a junior minister, the best he could hope for if Mr Cameron were still in Downing Street in June 2015.

The House of Commons did not love him the last time he was there, nor he it. He has higher things on his mind, and those things will only be available to those who are already MPs after the May general election.